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I don't believe they evaluated Linux. They sound like old FreeBSD friends and they were probably using it all the time. Furthermore, their announcement sounds very strange (like attack on Linux) and makes impression they prefer to support Linux competition. While they're using MS tech like Silverlight and FreeBSD is very MS friendly I wouldn't be surprised if MS has something to do with this.

FreeBSD serving some serious data? That seems about right. HPC appliances like Panasas blades run FreeBSD to push 40 gigabit infiniband traffic. Do you really think these guys are "Good ole boys?" That would make for an interesting comparison: Lustre versus Panasas.

Yeah, MS embracing FreeBSD ... right. What about the Novell pact they have? Remember those 30 some odd Microsoft patents Linux violates (EDIT: allegedly)? If you sign with SuSE you're immune! How about Moonlight and Mono (which are open source)?

It's not like FreeBSD doesn't work, it probably does but let's be honest here. They didn't choose FreeBSD based on technical merit alone, they chose it because of the license which allows them to do whatever the heck they want. Linux is far more mature and I'm sure would have required less work but companies like Netflix like to keep their proprietary stuff safe which the BSD license guarantees.
Anyway I'm still going to use Linux and that famous bay , I hear it has free, no DRM movies ...
Competition in general though is not bad so bring it on FreeBSD ... so far compared to Linux I'm not impressed at all.

That seems to be true according to their response:

Linux works wonderfully on EC2 for our C&C and computational tasks, FreeBSD is proving to work well on deployed hardware for serving bits. It highly maintainable, and there's an excellent community supporting it.

Arguments like maintainable and excellent community aren't used in conjunction to Linux.

Linux is open source, and FreeBSD is open source.
They are both open source. So they are open source friends!

Originally Posted by XorEaxEax

This is the drawback as I see it with BSD and corporate use, there is very little incentive to release code back which your competitors can use without them doing the same. This means these companies will likely fund FreeBSD development as the 'common base' on which to build their optimized solutions, optimizations which likely never make it back since that would be like handing your competitors an advantage.

Getting your patched merged upstreams is great, because it makes it easier to maintain since you don't have to re-patch every new release, and fix patches when they break.

Netflix's decision to use FreeBSD for their CDN was based on the technical merits of FreeBSD and because the engineers in charge of that project like FreeBSD. It's a great operating system with solid performance. It just doesn't have the mindshare of Linux-based operating systems. I use FreeBSD and Linux-based distros, and each have their strength and weaknesses.

In addition, Netflix uses plenty of Linux. Just look at the job descriptions for the open positions.

Liking something or not aren't technical merits. When comes to technical merits they didn't really mention a single one. It's not more solid and faster than Linux, so their reasons must be different (like their experience in FreeBSD you already mentioned).

Guy's really? Why does it seem like every time there is a story about FreeBSD there is a bunch of Linux fan boy's screaming how crappy it is. Yea maybe it doesn't have the fan base that Linux has but but I bet if look closely you'll find a lot of products that you interface with that use FreeBSD code. Aside from the fact that most of you are using MAC's that are running OSX right? guess what that's actually based on FreeBSD. Anyone heard of Juniper, JunOS? yea that's FreeBSD based. Cisco and NetApp both use a large amount of FreeBSD code in their product. If you move on from FreeBSD to the other BSD's you'll find a lot of code has move into Linux from the BSD community. OpenSSH is a product of OpenBSD community. And what, a couple of years ago some Linux programmers were trying to re-brand the a wireless driver that the OpenBSD community wrote? So the next time you feel get the urge to sit there and go BSD sux, BSD sux, BSD sux, please do us all a favor. Take your laptop outside and put 7 .45 hollow point rounds into it and take up farming because all your doing is waisting our time and showing you don't deserve all the work that our open source fore barres have provided. For the rest of us maybe it's time to look at FreeBSD again and see what Netfilx, Yahoo, Cisco, Juniper, and Apple are seeing.

This is just a proof FreeBSD doesn't serve community, but companies. Why would any sane dev from FreeBSD camp would be proud of supporting closed source operating systems BSD license allows us to do what we want, so next time when someone takes BSD code just shut up. You should be proud Linux took an Atheros driver from you the same as you're proud when OS X and Windows uses your code. The only thing I wish from you is to serve us better.

Linux is open source, and FreeBSD is open source.
They are both open source. So they are open source friends!

That's a whole of bullshit. They were never friends. Linux is friendly to Open Source Community. FreeBSD uses anti-community license which mainly serves companies and closed products. MS and Apple are laughing from idiots who think Linux and BSD have the same purpose and goals. Their Open Source is much different.